Velocity Europe 2014 Schedule

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Your software architects are probably out there drinking the Microservices kool-aid right now, and dreaming of building the next system using those patterns.
Microservices is a wonderful silver bullet that has the possibility and capability to make an operations teams life a complete nightmare.
Learn how to talk to your architects and dev team and help them think about the problems

13:45-14:25 (40m)
Operations

It's 3AM, Do You Know Why You Got Paged?

Ryan Frantz (Etsy)

When it’s three in the morning, it’s hard enough waking up, let alone getting your brain in gear to fix problems. Computers should provide us with additional context around an alert, so that we can resolve issues faster and get back to sleep. This presentation discusses how to contextualize alerts, automatically, so that engineers can address issues faster and get back to what they were doing.

14:30-15:10 (40m)
Operations

Customizing Chef for Fun and Profit

Jon Cowie (Chef)

A whistlestop tour through the internals of Chef, exploring how everything fits together and the various places you can hook in custom code. I'm particularly going to focus on helping you decide when it's appropriate to use each customization type and also whether or not you *should* customize.

16:00-16:40 (40m)
Operations

Session

To be confirmed

16:45-17:25 (40m)
Operations

Caching the Uncacheable

Hooman Beheshti (Fastly)

In the past, CDNs have been used to cache and distribute static objects. But issues around invalidation, staleness, and a lack of visibility have prevented us from using CDNs to fully leverage the benefits of caching when it comes to dynamic content. We'll look at the challenges CDNs have faced with dynamic content and how to fully integrate your applications to leverage their global reach.

17:30-18:10 (40m)

Velocity Ask The Audience Quiz

Perry Dyball (Seatwave Ltd), Stephen Thair (DevOpsGuys)

In the closing session rather than having the audience asking a panel of experts for their top performance tips, we are going to be asking YOU for all the answers. Using quiz tech from getkahoot.com, there will be rounds on Web Performance, DevOps, Mobile and finally Miscellanea where things get a little freaky! Make sure your smart phones are powered up for a chance to win some great prizes.

11:50-12:30 (40m)
Performance

Lossy Compression of True-color PNG Images

Kornel Lesiński (FT Labs)

PNG images with alpha transparency are incredibly useful in web design, but their large file sizes are at odds with good page performance.
With a special encoder it's possible to create PNG images that are up to 40% smaller, and still compatible with all browsers, support smooth transparency and millions of colors.
I'm going to show you how to do it, whether you're a designer or a developer.

13:45-14:25 (40m)
Performance

RIP Onload: Finding a Better Measurement Yardstick

Buddy Brewer (SOASTA), Philip Tellis (SOASTA)

Looking for an alternative to onload? Let's find one together.

14:30-15:10 (40m)
Performance

Breaking News at 1000ms

Patrick Hamann (Fastly)

Using new research and real world examples, Patrick will cover a range of techniques – from the controversial to bleeding edge – the Guardian are using to make their next generation website load as fast as possible, and ultimately breaking the news to the user within 1000ms.

16:00-16:40 (40m)
Performance

Offline-first Web Apps

Matt Andrews (Financial Times)

Service Worker is set to turn the web on its head, enabling websites to run fast on any connection. Learn how to use it and its predecessor to eliminate the network to create web apps with unbeatable performance.

16:45-17:25 (40m)
Performance

Look, Ma, No Image Requests!

Pamela Fox (Khan Academy)

In a single day and one code review, we were able to remove 10+ HTTP requests for images from our landing page, and sped up the page load time by more than 2x. This talk looks at the 5 different techniques for removing those images and the tools that made those techniques easier.

11:50-12:30 (40m)
Mobile

Etsy’s Journey to Building a Continuous Integration Infrastructure for Mobile Apps

Nassim Kammah (Etsy)

At this time, the app stores approval process prevents us from practicing Continuous Delivery for native mobile apps. Nonetheless, we can still practice agile development, committing often and detecting defects as early as they are introduced with a robust continuous integration infrastructure. This talk will explore Etsy's journey to building such an infrastructure.

13:45-14:25 (40m)
Mobile

Mobile Performance: When is Good Practice Irresponsible?

Andrew Still (Intechnica)

This session will look at some recommendations for performance improvement on mobile devices and ask whether they are responsible or irresponsible when viewed beyond just performance of our application. This will cover areas such as the impact on battery life, data usage and other issues that can lead to users removing apps. We will also look at what can be done to minimise these negative impacts.

14:30-15:10 (40m)
Mobile

How We Sped up Baidu Map's Mobile Website to the Next Level

Zheng Jia (Baidu)

Maps are one of the fundamental services for mobile users and are more often used on mobile platform than others. So the performance of map mobile sites is so important that no one should ignore. Speeding up the sites can reduce the time that users find places, get directions, make decisions about where to eat, etc.

16:00-16:40 (40m)
Mobile

Recycling: Why the Web is Slowing Your Mobile App

Colin Bendell (Cloudinary)

If you are building a mobile app or hybrid responsive app you are probably thinking deeply about reusing components and data APIs from your web site. In this talk we will explore some common pitfalls in using web components & web APIs in mobile apps. We will look at the impact on operations, network performance, scalability and reliability - and how to overcome these challenges.

16:45-17:25 (40m)
Mobile

Responsive Images are Coming to a Browser Near You

Yoav Weiss (Akamai)

Today, Responsive Web design often means using one of the various Responsive Images hacks or take a performance hit. In a short while, that will no longer be the case. A native Responsive Images solution is coming soon to a browser near you. In this session we will discuss this solution in depth, and see how you can start using it in your current designs.

11:50-12:30 (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

Running Cross Functional Service Teams

Philip Reynolds (Workday)

Service orientated architecture and, more recently, microservice architectures have become popular patterns as large scale architectures. The idea of decoupling services and having independently deployable units lends itself well to large scale applications in the cloud.
Those same principles of autonomous units can also be applied organisationally leading to greater efficiencies at scale.

13:45-14:25 (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

Performance is a People Problem

Ben Evans (jClarity)

In this session, we will discuss how the care and feeding of modern production environments extends beyond the domain of the Ops team, and into development, testing and management functions. We'll examine common communication and other problems (such as cognitive biases), and look at some innovative ways to approach solving them.

14:30-15:10 (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

Collaboration Beyond the Tech Silo

James Stewart (jystewart.net)

The same commitment to collaboration, communication and empathy that drives devops can be applied much more widely across organisations, bringing together radically different disciplines to respond to user needs. This session looks at how to drive that sort of collaboration and how vital it is to transforming large organisations.

16:00-16:40 (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

Using Promise Theory to Improve Digital Service Quality

Jeff Sussna (Ingineering.IT)

Promise Theory is a formal model for describing complex distributed systems. It can also be used to describe socio-technical systems such as DevOps or even entire digital service organizations. This session will demonstrate Promise Theory’s ability to improve service quality by helping us increase empathy and better understand certainty and uncertainty in the systems we manage.

16:45-17:25 (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

How BBC Sport Scales Engineering

Keith Mitchell (EF Education First)

BBC Sport online is Europe's best-loved Sports site handling billions of requests each month. The engineering team behind this has expanded rapidly over the past 2 years and has established new working practices in order to deliver a team as performant as the final product. This session describes the key aspects of our culture, how it's evolved, the challenges we faced and our current approaches.

11:50-12:30 (40m)
Sponsored

Developing a Globally Distributed Purging System

Tyler McMullen (Fastly), Bruce Spang (Fastly)

How do you build a distributed cache invalidation system that can invalidate content in 150 milliseconds across a global network of servers? We will discuss the process of constructing a production-ready distributed system built on solid theoretical foundations. This talk will cover using research to design systems, the bimodal multicast algorithm, and the behavior of this system in production.

14:30-15:10 (40m)
Sponsored

Improving the Performance of Data Mashups To Maximize Your Return on Digital Initiatives

Abelardo Gonzalez (Keynote Systems)

Trends like mobile and social media have disrupted the traditional definition of performance and transformed expectations of customers. Investing in digital initiatives that enhance customer experience now requires a fundamental shift in approach to performance insights. How do you maximize the performance of your apps without sacrificing user experience?

Program Chairs, John Allspaw, Courtney Nash and Steve Souders open the second day of keynotes.

9:40-10:00 (20m)

Upgrading the Web: Polyfills, Components and the Future of Web Development at Scale

Andrew Betts (Fastly)

This talk will make you think about the principles of your development process, to support new, more scalable web development practices. I’ll also be talking about a new public project sponsored by the FT and Fastly to build a community polyfill service to support those better practices. It’s time to upgrade the web.

10:00-10:10 (10m)
Sponsored

Web Performance: Monitoring the Beast

Mehdi Daoudi (Catchpoint)

Like a rampaging bull, the internet is a complex beast that’s ready to take down your site at a moment’s notice. Join Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint Systems, to learn how you can elude some of the more unpredictable movements and get back on your feet.

10:10-10:30 (20m)

Cultures of Continuous Learning

Vanessa Hurst (CodeMontage)

“In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.” Ever-changing technologies and evolving systems require we never stop learning, but how does successful learning happen in increasingly complex organizations?

10:30-10:35 (5m)
Sponsored

Troubleshooting Using HTTP Headers

Steve Miller-Jones (Limelight Networks)

Testing, monitoring and analysis of website and web-application performance requires a range of analysis and reporting tools, if you have to create a comprehensive view of the influencing factors. In this session we look at how Limelight securely exposes data about CDN service and object delivery behavior, using HTTP headers.

10:35-10:40 (5m)
Sponsored

Monitoring without Alerts - and Why it Makes Way More Sense than You Might Think

Alois Reitbauer (Dynatrace)

Let’s face it. Alerting is broken. We are all still alerting the same way is we did in the early days of software based on metrics violations. We have all started to accept that we get too many alerts and the hard work of making sense is still left to us. This talk will introduce you to the concept of contextual alerting and show the difference hands on using a real world example.

10:40-10:50 (10m)

Lowering the Barrier to Programming

Pamela Fox (Khan Academy)

As the web gets bigger and more ubiquitous, we will need more programmers and more people understanding programming. How can we do that? I'll share what I've learned from teaching programming to newbies, online at Khan Academy and in-person for women in San Francisco.

10:50-10:55 (5m)
Sponsored

Velocity at GitHub

Brian Doll (SourceClear)

It’s been seven years since the first commit, and today there are over seven million people building better software, faster, on GitHub. For over six years, the incredible community that has formed around the Velocity conference has presented and advocated for all things fast and stable, and everyone is listening. Let’s take a look ahead at what in store next.

Program Chairs, John Allspaw, Courtney Nash and Steve Souders close the second day of keynotes.

12:30-13:45 (1h 15m)
Event

Tuesday Lunchtime Birds of a Feather

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions are informal roundtable discussions happening during lunch on Monday, 17 November and Tuesday, 18 November. You can join any BoF table or start your own with a topic of your choice. The BoF sign-up board will be near the Registration area.

8:30-9:30 (1h)

Break: Morning Coffee Service

11:15-11:50 (35m)

Break: Morning Break - Sponsored by Keynote

15:10-16:00 (50m)

Break: Afternoon Break - Sponsored by Keynote

18:10-19:10 (1h)
Event

Closing Reception (Sponsored by SOASTA)

Join us after sessions on the last day of Velocity for a Closing Reception and make those last connections before leaving the conference.